After weeks of speculation, Motorola has officially unveiled the Moto G smartphone at an event in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The Motorola Moto G will be available in at least 30 countries with 60 Google partners by 2014.
The Google-owned handset maker has announced that the Moto G will be sold through the company’s website in the US, with no contract, no SIM lock and an unlockable bootloader at $179 (Rs. 11,300 approximately) for the 8GB storage model, while the 16GB variant will be available at $199 (Rs. 12,600 approximately). Notably, there is no option for expandable storage available.
Motorola Moto G will be available in Brazil starting this week, and the smartphone will be released in Latin America, Europe, Canada and parts of Asia over the next few weeks.
The company assured attendees of the conference that it was working with its partners to ensure the purchase cost to consumers remained as low as possible.
Interestingly, Motorola has finally confirmed that it will be re-entering the Indian market with the Moto G smartphone, with a launch in “early-January 2014”.
Other markets to get the Motorola Moto G in the same period include the US, the Middle East and more countries in Asia. Further, Motorola announced that Moto G will also be available in a dual-SIM variant, for select markets.
While announcing the Moto G, Dennis Woodside, Motorola’s CEO, also contrasted the device with premium smartphones costing $600, and said, “Today, we’re introducing Moto G, a smartphone that delivers a premium experience for a third of the price of current high-end phones.”
Woodside, when speaking about the reason for making the Moto G, had mentioned that the global average price of a smartphone was $200, but for that amount, people had to either settle for some very basic specifications that robbed them of a complete smartphone experience, or, buy an older, obsolete version of a phone that was being sold for cheap. With the Moto G, the Google-owned mobile manufacturer wanted to offer modern specifications that gave customers a seamless smartphone and mobile Internet experience, at the $200 price point.
The Motorola Moto G runs Android 4.3 out-of-the-box and the Google-owned handset maker also ‘guaranteed’ that the smartphone will be getting the Android 4.4 KitKat by January 2014.
The Moto G features a 4.5-inch HD ‘edge-to-edge’ (for a supposed better touch experience) display with a resolution of 720×1280 pixels (translating to a pixel density of 329ppi) and a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 screen.
Powered by a quad-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 (Cortex-A7) processor coupled with an Adreno 305 GPU, the Moto G features 1GB of RAM.
With a demo on stage of a graphics intensive game, the company re-stressed that the Moto G is powerful enough to deliver a strong performance even on the most strenuous Android tasks.
On the optics front, the Moto G sports a 5-megapixel rear camera along with an LED flash and also includes a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera.
The rear camera supports HD (720p) video recording. The Motorola Moto G also features water-resistant nano-coating on the inside and outside.
The Moto G packs a 2070mAh battery, which Motorola claims can deliver up to 30 percent more talktime than the Apple iPhone 5s.
The company really stressed on how it has worked to optimise battery life, making the Moto G last well over a day, which it claims to have achieved in part due to the software optimisation.
Leave a Reply